Religious talk quickly degenerates into insider talk, but what if we turned it back out? Episcopal Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves takes six words related to Christian faith and translates them so they speak more broadly to those who proclaim themselves “spiritual but not religious.” Tying together Jesus’ parables and life today, this engaging title promises to help non-Christians explore faith and spiritual practice and train Christians to speak clearly about the things that matter most.

Religious talk quickly degenerates into insider talk, but what if we turned it back out? Episcopal Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves takes six words related to Christian faith and translates them so they speak more broadly to those who proclaim themselves “spiritual but not religious.” Tying together Jesus’ parables and life today, this engaging title promises to help non-Christians explore faith and spiritual practice and train Christians to speak clearly about the things that matter most.

Kevin Vost shows you how to discover each of your ten talents, and then how to understand and perfect them.

An exploration of how brain structure and cultural content interacted in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago to produce unique life patterns and belief systems. What do the headless figures found in the famous paintings at Catalhoyuk in Turkey have in common with the monumental tombs at Newgrange and Knowth in Ireland? How can the concepts of "birth," "death," and "wild" cast light on the archaeological enigma of the domestication of cattle? What generated the revolutionary social change that ended the Upper Palaeolithic? David Lewis-Williams's previous book, The Mind in the Cave, dealt with the remarkable Upper Palaeolithic paintings, carvings, and engravings of western Europe. Here Dr. Lewis-Williams and David Pearce examine the intricate web of belief, myth, and society in the succeeding Neolithic period, arguably the most significant turning point in all human history, when agriculture became a way of life and the fractious society that we know today was born. The authors focus on two contrasting times and places: the beginnings in the Near East, with its mud-brick and stone houses each piled on top of the ruins of another, and western Europe, with its massive stone monuments more ancient than the Egyptian pyramids. They argue that neurological patterns hardwired into the brain help explain the art and society that Neolithic people produced. Drawing on the latest research, the authors skillfully link material on human consciousness, imagery, and religious concepts to propose provocative new theories about the causes of an ancient revolution in cosmology and the origins of social complexity. In doing so they create a fascinating neurological bridge to the mysterious thought-lives of the past and reveal the essence of a momentous period in human history. 100 illustrations, 20 in color.

Have you wondered what God's intentions are or if He has intentions for you? Answers to these questions and more are found in Unearthing Your Heavenly Election, which reveals the logical love in God's choosing of you to be in heaven with Him eternally. Unearthing Your Heavenly Election is a compilation of verses from the Old and New Testaments progressively arranged to uncover the sensible reasoning behind predestination. As an added bonus, you will learn the parallel doctrine in the Bible that will relieve, comfort, and empower your Christian walk. That is the doctrine of eternal security. You will find answers to questions like: How can you claim Jesus chose me when I am the one who chose Jesus? Can people lose their salvation? Why would some people not be chosen? Study in depth Jesus' separation of the goats from His sheep, and come to understand His parables of the talents, wheat, and tares. Take advantage of the included glossary for simple definitions of commonly used Christian words viewed in the light of election. Start enjoying your Christian walk as you shed vague ideas concerning salvation, and instead, embrace the clarity and intensity of it. Release your grip on guilt, and let it fall away as you discover more love than you have ever known. Lose the confusion you have had about God's saving grace, and find the answers to questions you have been afraid to ask. Come to a place of peace and relaxation with yourself and with God.

A thrilling mystery woven into a beautifully constructed family memoir: Meryl Frank’s journey to seek the truth about a beloved and revolutionary cousin, a celebrated actress in Vilna before World War II, and to answer the question of how the next generation should honor the memory of the Holocaust. As a child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl’s cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna’s Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed. Unearthed is the story of Meryl’s search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin—her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl’s search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world. Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In LIVING WITH A WILD GOD, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find "the Truth" about the universe and everything else: What's really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a "mystical experience"-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering. In LIVING WITH A WILD GOD, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination, Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the power not only to entertain but amaze.